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yendiVillage of the Damned. 1995. Directed by John Carpenter. Written by David Himmelstein. Distributed by Universal.
I know, I said I'd stop with the sucktastic Carpenter works (sorry,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elionwyr). But since tomorrow is May 1 (and thus the day for a classic), and since I'm already planning a good Carpenter movie for tomorrow's post, you'll have to deal with one more piece of crap today. And his remake of Village of the Damned completes the trifecta of suck that represents the low point of his work since They Live*. Released in 1995, this remake follows the same basic plotline as the original (and John Wyndham's source novel, The Midwich Cuckoos), but throws in a ton of extra violence, lots of completely out of place (and out of their depth) actors, and a heaping ton of suck.
See, in the quiet little town of Midwich, everyone is living an idyllic life, when suddenly and without warning, there's a total eclipse of the sun. Wait. Wrong movie. Instead, everyone in town gets the complete works of Herman Melville** piped into their brains, causing them all to fall asleep instantly, regardless of what they were doing. This includes one guy who falls asleep on his outdoor grill and burns to a crisp, thus providing both the only interesting scene in the entire movie, and setting the tone for everything that will follow, as gore trumps plot and dialogue time and again.
Of course, when everyone (other than Grillface***) wakes up, they have no memories of what happened. But ten of the town's women end up pregnant, and it seems likely that they all got pregnant on that one fateful day, even though none of them remember any nookie. Nine months later, nine of the women give birth, but one child dies during birth.
As the kids grow up, they turn out to be creepy. Really, really creepy. When one of them gets hurt during an eye exam, the rest of the kids stare at the doctor until she puts lens cleaner in her own eye. That sort of creepy. They never seem to play, or have fun, or do anything interesting at all, and none of them look like their alleged parents. Which is probably good, when you think about it, because playful kids with the power to bend minds is about the scariest thing imaginable.
We spend most of the movie meeting a handful of "there to be killed" characters who die miserable, predictable, and boring deaths. We also see that one little boy seems different the rest. See, there were supposed to be five boys and five girls, and the baby who died was a girl, so now he's lost his partner. The other evil kids, showing the one sign that they're not really any different from normal kids, ostracize him. To make matter worse, his mom is played by Linda Kozlowski, so the other kids also tease him and call him "Baby Crocodile Dundee****."
We also get Evil Government Scientists (tm), who monitor the babies over the years and foist Kirstie Alley on Midwich, which has to be a violation of something in the Constitution. She plays an epidemiologist, and is every bit as convincing in this role as Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist, but twice as annoying. As a bonus feature, we get Mark Hamill as a priest and Christopher Reeve as the dad of the evilest little kid of the bunch.
Eventually, everyone realizes that the kids are evil. Bad shit happens to some of them. Kirstie Alley ends up dissecting herself. We discover that the kids are the spawn of aliens. Christopher Reeve blows himself up and takes the evil kids with him. Linda Kozlowski and her Good Seed son escape, and they live happily ever after.
This is one of those movies that just makes you wonder what the hell Carpenter was thinking. I mean, sure, the idea of evil kids has always been a great hook, but why take a plot that relies on creepiness and an inverted take on the idea that we need to sacrifice to protect our children and muddy it up with straight-up action tropes and gore? Especially since Carpenter's best movies have all worked because of how well they set the mood, with the violence only serving as one of the tools employed by Carpenter to accomplish that.
And then there's the cast. Look, I love Mark Hamill. At least, I love him as Luke Skywalker. But since then, he's proven to be a great voice actor, but not much else. Put simply: the man overacts. A lot. And casting him as a priest is just a bad idea.
The rest of the cast is equally lame. Kozlowski owes her career to one role in a gimmick movie, and certainly doesn't attempt anything special here. Reeve, a wonderful man, is simply cast out of his depth. And asking Kirstie Alley to play a scientist (and in a movie that's not intentionally comedic) is begging for disaster.
In fairness, the kids themselves are all pretty good and nicely creepy. Alas, they're the exceptions.
Bad acting doesn't have to doom a horror movie. But throw in two-dimensional characters, and there's simply no sympathy created for anyone. Following that up with a complete failure to explore the potential emotional ramifications of parents being forced to confront the fact that their kids are evil is an even worse mistake. Not creating anything resembling a mood or a sense of danger is a fatal mistake. Village of the Damned ends up being a mess, nothing more. Unless you've waited your entire life to see someone burnt to a crisp on a grill*****, skip this and go see the George Saunders original.
*Escape From L.A., although sucktastic, suffers more because it offers nothing new; In the Mouth of Madness is actually the only ray of hope from Carpenter in recent years; his TV work (Body Bags and Masters of Horror) is both inconsistent and in a different medium; and Memoirs of an Invisible Man might suck, but at least some of the blame has to lie with Chevy Chase.
**My spellchecker insists that I should call him "Herman Melvin."
***Yes, I'm swiping from Scrubs. It was actually watching last week's episode that made me decide to review this film.
****Not really. Nor do they tease him because his mom can't act yet has somehow gotten the lead role in this movie. But they should.
*****And really, Sleepaway Camp 2 already pulled this one off quite nicely.
I know, I said I'd stop with the sucktastic Carpenter works (sorry,
elionwyr). But since tomorrow is May 1 (and thus the day for a classic), and since I'm already planning a good Carpenter movie for tomorrow's post, you'll have to deal with one more piece of crap today. And his remake of Village of the Damned completes the trifecta of suck that represents the low point of his work since They Live*. Released in 1995, this remake follows the same basic plotline as the original (and John Wyndham's source novel, The Midwich Cuckoos), but throws in a ton of extra violence, lots of completely out of place (and out of their depth) actors, and a heaping ton of suck.See, in the quiet little town of Midwich, everyone is living an idyllic life, when suddenly and without warning, there's a total eclipse of the sun. Wait. Wrong movie. Instead, everyone in town gets the complete works of Herman Melville** piped into their brains, causing them all to fall asleep instantly, regardless of what they were doing. This includes one guy who falls asleep on his outdoor grill and burns to a crisp, thus providing both the only interesting scene in the entire movie, and setting the tone for everything that will follow, as gore trumps plot and dialogue time and again.
Of course, when everyone (other than Grillface***) wakes up, they have no memories of what happened. But ten of the town's women end up pregnant, and it seems likely that they all got pregnant on that one fateful day, even though none of them remember any nookie. Nine months later, nine of the women give birth, but one child dies during birth.
As the kids grow up, they turn out to be creepy. Really, really creepy. When one of them gets hurt during an eye exam, the rest of the kids stare at the doctor until she puts lens cleaner in her own eye. That sort of creepy. They never seem to play, or have fun, or do anything interesting at all, and none of them look like their alleged parents. Which is probably good, when you think about it, because playful kids with the power to bend minds is about the scariest thing imaginable.
We spend most of the movie meeting a handful of "there to be killed" characters who die miserable, predictable, and boring deaths. We also see that one little boy seems different the rest. See, there were supposed to be five boys and five girls, and the baby who died was a girl, so now he's lost his partner. The other evil kids, showing the one sign that they're not really any different from normal kids, ostracize him. To make matter worse, his mom is played by Linda Kozlowski, so the other kids also tease him and call him "Baby Crocodile Dundee****."
We also get Evil Government Scientists (tm), who monitor the babies over the years and foist Kirstie Alley on Midwich, which has to be a violation of something in the Constitution. She plays an epidemiologist, and is every bit as convincing in this role as Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist, but twice as annoying. As a bonus feature, we get Mark Hamill as a priest and Christopher Reeve as the dad of the evilest little kid of the bunch.
Eventually, everyone realizes that the kids are evil. Bad shit happens to some of them. Kirstie Alley ends up dissecting herself. We discover that the kids are the spawn of aliens. Christopher Reeve blows himself up and takes the evil kids with him. Linda Kozlowski and her Good Seed son escape, and they live happily ever after.
This is one of those movies that just makes you wonder what the hell Carpenter was thinking. I mean, sure, the idea of evil kids has always been a great hook, but why take a plot that relies on creepiness and an inverted take on the idea that we need to sacrifice to protect our children and muddy it up with straight-up action tropes and gore? Especially since Carpenter's best movies have all worked because of how well they set the mood, with the violence only serving as one of the tools employed by Carpenter to accomplish that.
And then there's the cast. Look, I love Mark Hamill. At least, I love him as Luke Skywalker. But since then, he's proven to be a great voice actor, but not much else. Put simply: the man overacts. A lot. And casting him as a priest is just a bad idea.
The rest of the cast is equally lame. Kozlowski owes her career to one role in a gimmick movie, and certainly doesn't attempt anything special here. Reeve, a wonderful man, is simply cast out of his depth. And asking Kirstie Alley to play a scientist (and in a movie that's not intentionally comedic) is begging for disaster.
In fairness, the kids themselves are all pretty good and nicely creepy. Alas, they're the exceptions.
Bad acting doesn't have to doom a horror movie. But throw in two-dimensional characters, and there's simply no sympathy created for anyone. Following that up with a complete failure to explore the potential emotional ramifications of parents being forced to confront the fact that their kids are evil is an even worse mistake. Not creating anything resembling a mood or a sense of danger is a fatal mistake. Village of the Damned ends up being a mess, nothing more. Unless you've waited your entire life to see someone burnt to a crisp on a grill*****, skip this and go see the George Saunders original.
*Escape From L.A., although sucktastic, suffers more because it offers nothing new; In the Mouth of Madness is actually the only ray of hope from Carpenter in recent years; his TV work (Body Bags and Masters of Horror) is both inconsistent and in a different medium; and Memoirs of an Invisible Man might suck, but at least some of the blame has to lie with Chevy Chase.
**My spellchecker insists that I should call him "Herman Melvin."
***Yes, I'm swiping from Scrubs. It was actually watching last week's episode that made me decide to review this film.
****Not really. Nor do they tease him because his mom can't act yet has somehow gotten the lead role in this movie. But they should.
*****And really, Sleepaway Camp 2 already pulled this one off quite nicely.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 03:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 12:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 03:43 am (UTC)(somehow, I think not...)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 12:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 04:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 12:45 pm (UTC)Besides which, I think you are underestimating yourself. I regularly laugh out loud reading them.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 02:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 06:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 12:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 07:25 am (UTC)About the money?
It must be tough to be in great demand, then not be able to make anything. But to get out of that rut, you need to ensure that the stuff you do make is, you know, good if not successful.
I've never had any inclination to watch this and Memoirs.. again.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 12:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 12:47 pm (UTC)I seem to recall that this was done in The Bad Seed (the original, not the remake, which had the advantage only of being in color). Or perhaps I'm confusing the movie with the book.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 02:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-01 02:48 pm (UTC)But... she's a scientologist... isn't that the same thing? =)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-02 02:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-02 12:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-02 02:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-02 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-02 03:48 am (UTC)